Teachers and students can use Classkick to provide more individualized, real-time feedback at the moment the students need it. ClassKick is a free tool that allows students to respond using any device, but Mrs. Bauriedl used iPads and they worked great. Mrs. Bauriedl was giving her students a group test on the day of this visit. Students shared that they liked using this tool because of the immediate feedback they were getting. Mrs. Bauriedl shared that this tool allowed her to continue to move around the room oversee the work and at the same time she can see, on her iPad, when students are ready for an item to be graded or when they need help. She was able to immediately give feedback for the students to improve their responses to the questions. In addition, ClassKick has comments built into it which can be customized and used for additional feedback.
Immediate feedback is a key feature of this tool. Not only can the teacher give instant feedback but, if the teacher chooses, the students can also provide assistance to each other. The really cool thing about this help feature is that the student names are anonymous so students don't know who they are helping. Mrs. Bauriedl shared that her students, on a prior use of ClassKick, were rushing to try to help each other even though they had no idea who they were helping. This was a really engaging, easy to use, and free tool and it was great to see that it was possible to use it in a setting where every student didn't have a device. The students collaborated on the problem solving process and as a group decided on their responses in this group test. It was very powerful to see the engagement of the groups. In talking with a few students, I found that students agreed it will even be more beneficial when every student has a device. This is definitely a tool that I recommend to keep us moving forward on our Road to Relevance. Thank you Mrs. Bauriedl for sharing this great find.
If you have a cool tool or lesson that you would like to showcase, please contact me by email or at extension 1007. Remember the more we learn together, the more we all grow together.

A Web Whiteboard

I just came across what looks to be a great free tool. It is called A Web Whiteboard and it allows interaction by multiple users to a web whiteboard. It's a perfect tool for teachers who are looking for a way to have student interact on a projected screen to the whole class and it allows all students with a device who are invited to participate can see the interaction on their own devices. This tool works on computers, tablets, and smartphones. It requires no installation. In my quick review it appears to be very easy to use. What a great tool for brainstorming or collaborative problem solving. Check out this site, it's in your price range "free".ClickHere.

MacBook Tips- Check out more of Brennen's Tech Tips

I hope you enjoyed this Youtube find from last week. I enjoy these videos because they are short and easy to follow. Click here to see another round of Brennen's Tech Tips for MacBooks.

Google Tips

Document Outline
Document Outline allows you to easily structure your documents. Outline is also a great tool to help you quickly navigate the different parts of your documents. Once activated, Document outline displaces a pane to the left of the page featuring all the headers contained in your document. Clicking on each of these headers will jump you straight to its corresponding section. You don’t even have to manually apply headers, Google Docs smartly detects the different sections of your documents and generates an outline accordingly which you can edit as you want.Here is how to open a document outline in Google Docs:
Open a Google Docs document then click ‘tools’ and select ‘document outline’.

​Convert Google Docs to EPUB
Google Docs released another new interesting feature that allows users to download their Google documents in EPUB format. And as you know, EPUB is a file format that you can download and read in different digital devices (smartphones, tablets, computers) and through various apps and e-readers. With this new feature, you will be able to create and share digital content that can be read on a ‘diverse range of screen sizes and devices’. To convert a Google document into EPUB, you simply click on ‘File’, then hover over ‘Download as’ and choose ‘EPUB publication’ as shown in the GIF below.

Voice Commands in Google Docs
This is basically a voice enabled formatting functionality that allows Docs users to easily edit and format their documents using voice commands. This new feature comes to complete the Voice Typing functionality that was added to Google Docs a few months ago. Users of Google Docs are now able to not only compose documents and write down notes without touching their keyboards but are also able to format their documents using speech commands such as “copy,” “insert table,” and “highlight.” You can check the full list of commands from this page.

JoeZoo - Add On for Google Classroom
This weeks Google tip features include an add-on to Google Classroom. I am sharing this for anyone who has an interest in expanding your use of Google Classroom. I will give a caveat in that it's fairly new and there may still some minor issues that need to be worked out, but the reviews were that it does what it says it will. This is an add-on that can be uploaded to everyone, but it's not ready, in my opinion, for us to do that yet, but if anyone wants to play with it, please feel free to download it and give it a try.JoeZ Express is an excellent feedback and grading tool integrated with Google Classroom and Google Drive. It is available as both an add-on that you can install and use on your Google Docs (best for independent teachers) and also as an app called JoeZoo (best for schools and districts). The app has, besides all of the add-on tools and features, more exclusive features that include student monkey checker, teacher monkey checker and rubric sharing. JoeZoo Express allows teachers to give students better and direct feedback. With the new update, feedback is now visual and colour coded to help students with recall, and to make things even easier for teachers, JooZoo provides over 90 most commonly used comments. Using the assess mode, teachers can easily grade students docs. They can add comments, messages and grades. Another interesting feature from JooZoo is the interactive rubric builder. It allows teachers to create a wide variety of rubrics and share them with others (watch the video in the playlist below to see how to create a rubric).Monkey checker is another huge time saving tool from JooZoo (available for the app users). Monkey checker is a great language processing engine and automated feedback tool. With a single click, Monkey checker can instantly process a whole essay, highlight writing errors and colour code them in such a way that they are matched with each of the 91 preloaded comments that clarify the error.